Bank withdrawal shrinks tour

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The number of Australian tournaments on the Australasian PGA Tour has been pruned down to just five for next year with the demise of another golf tournament.

The ANZ Championship, held last year at the Horizons resort in Port Stephens, near Newcastle, is dead after the withdrawal of the major sponsor.

The men's tour will be left with the Australian Open, Masters, PGA Championship, Heineken Classic and Jacobs Creek Open next year, augmented by two New Zealand tournaments and the Johnnie Walker Classic in Asia, which it co-sanctions with the European tour. There is also a secondary tour, the Von Nida Tour. Five years ago, there were 11 major Australian events on tour.

The collapse of the ANZ Championship, a 10-year-old event, is seen in the industry as a further sign of golf's struggles in the current environment, particularly with the amazing success of the American tour, on which at least 20 top Australians make their primary living.

"At the event (in the US) last week, every player got a set of keys to a Mercedes they had for the week, and they served smoked salmon for the caddies. We can't do smoked salmon. We can't play that game," said Steve Frazer, the Melbourne promoter who ran the ANZ Championship.

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Almost a year ago, IMG's Australasian managing director Martin Jolly predicted a culling of major tournaments in this country in the post-Greg Norman era, and he has already been proven correct.

While the Port Stephens event has not officially been killed off, Frazer is not planning on it going ahead. "I need at least $1.75 million prizemoney to run the event (with European tour sanction) and I need an investor to cover that or it won't go ahead," he said. "I'm not in a position to have that investor in place and I don't know where that queue starts."

Frazer said yesterday that with the US tour starting in January nowadays, the usual February dates for events in this country were becoming redundant.

"There are so many Australians playing on the American tour and to play here it is going to impact on their careers elsewhere," he said. "They've got to get to America to protect their rankings. It's a global situation we're dealing with.

"I can see a situation here where we'll have four really strong events and a strong development tour and that'll be fine. That's more realistic."

The future of other major tour events will continue to bubble, but the Australian Open will stay because it is run by the umbrella body, the Australian Golf Union, and the Australian PGA Championship is underpinned by the Queensland Government.

Jacobs Creek's sponsorship of the Adelaide tournament has run out, but the parent company is in talks with promoter Bob Tuohy and the PGA tour and is tipped to renew.

Heineken's sponsorship of the Heineken Classic at Royal Melbourne is believed to have another year to run.

Australasian PGA Tour chief executive Andrew Georgiou said the failure of the Port Stephens tournament was not necessarily a disaster. "It's the nature of sport," he said. "Sponsors come and go. We're quite buoyant about the way things are going.

"I think the number of events we have and the fact we've sustained the prizemoney we provide is quite amazing given the size of our economy."

Georgiou said it was unfair to compare the 11 events of five years ago to the five of 2005. "We had 19 events in 1997 and prizemoney of $7 million; today we have eight main tour events, 10 to 12 secondary tour events and more than $13 million in prizemoney. They're the real facts."